Spotlight on heat waves, ticks, ruined National Park visits and more; How to cope & why we must cut carbon pollution

WASHINGTON (July 1, 2014) — With July 4th upon us, the Natural Resources Defense Council is releasing a tip sheet today about eight summertime woes that will worsen if climate change isn’t combatted soon, along with steps individuals and the nation can take to ease the misery.

The tip sheet shows steps Americans can take to make life less miserable this summer. It also underscores the need to support safeguarding summers that lie ahead. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has recently begun to do just that, by proposing the first-ever limits on carbon pollution from the nation’s existing power plants. These plants account for 40 percent of U.S. carbon pollution and are a key driver of climate change.

“Across America, climate change already is super-charging summer, and with hotter days we’re seeing more risks to our health and happiness,” said Peter Altman, director of NRDC’s Climate Campaign. “We can ease these warm-day woes today, but it would be wrong to doom tomorrow’s families and children to even more heat waves, code red air alerts, disease-carrying ticks, poison ivy rashes, stomach illnesses and degraded national landmarks. That’s not a future they deserve. And that’s why we need to rein in the biggest source of climate pollution, the unrestricted carbon pollution from power plants.”

NRDC released the tip sheet— which provides links to supporting documentation about summer climate woes and possible individual and national actions to address them— during a telephone press conference today. It was hosted by Kim Knowlton, NRDC senior health scientist and a co-author of the human health chapter of the National Climate Assessment; and Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at the Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, another National Climate Assessment contributing author.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is an international nonprofit environmental organization with more than 1.4 million members and online activists. Since 1970, our lawyers, scientists, and other environmental specialists have worked to protect the world's natural resources, public health, and the environment. NRDC has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Bozeman, MT, and Beijing. Visit us at www.nrdc.org and follow us on Twitter .